Dreams from endangered cultures (Wade Davis)

With stunning photos and stories, National Geographic Explorer Wade
Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous
cultures, which are disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate.
Biographic
notes: Wade Davis is perhaps the most articulate and influential
western advocate for the world's indigenous cultures. A National
Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, he has been described as “a rare
combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all
of life’s diversity.” Trained in anthropology and botany at Harvard, he
travels the globe to live alongside indigenous people, and document
their cultural practices in books, photographs, and film. His stunning
photographs and evocative stories capture the viewer's imagination. As a
speaker, he parlays that sense of wonder into passionate concern over
the rate at which cultures and languages are disappearing -- 50 percent
of the world's 7,000 languages, he says, are no longer taught to
children. He argues, in the most beautiful terms, that language is much
more than vocabulary and grammatical rules. Every language is an
old-growth forest of the mind.